[Special to the Times: Bill Cooke]
Jesse Stewart Jr., general manager of the Royal Palm Crowne Plaza Resort, is show in Miami Beach with the hotel in the background.

By THOMAS C. TOBIN
© St. Petersburg Times,
published December 3, 2001

MIAMI -- In the tense first days of the 38-month boycott that slowed African-American tourism to a trickle here in the early 1990s, black lawyer H.T. Smith found himself seated across a table from a group of Miami's white business elite.

"If I could have taken a picture of their faces, it would have won a Pulitzer Prize," Smith says, recalling the moment in 1990 when he and other black leaders made a request so bold it seemed to stun their white counterparts.

Seeking payback after the city's official snubbing of Nelson Mandela, their list of 20 demands was topped by a dandy: public money for a first-class hotel on Miami Beach that would be owned by black people.

Said Smith: "Their mouths dropped wide open, as if to say, 'Are you absolutely out of your mind?' "

That was then.

Today, Smith plans to be one of the first guests at the $76-million Royal Palm Crowne Plaza Resort when it opens in mid January. The developers say it will be the first black-owned, full-service beach hotel in America.

"They couldn't keep me away," he said, calling the Royal Palm "a lasting monument to black Miamians' struggle for respect."

Financed with the help of $10-million from the city of Miami Beach, its twin 17-story towers overlook the city's famous strip along Ocean Drive to the south. To the north is the convention center, a five-minute walk away.

Rates will range from $209 in the summer for a room with a city view, to $659 in the winter for a suite that opens to the salty smell of the ocean. The resort incorporates two landmark art deco hotels, the Shorecrest, built in 1940, and the Royal Palm, a kosher hotel built in 1939.

But if the location is blessed with glitz and promise, it also recalls some painful racial history.

To the east are luscious views of the same beach where black people in the 1930s, '40s and '50s could not visit after dark without an ID card. Nearby are the preserved art deco hotels and clubs where Count Basie and other black entertainers of his era were invited to perform but not permitted to stay, forced to travel "over town" to a Miami neighborhood that came to incorporate those words -- Overtown.

The new hotel is owned by a group led by black businessman R. Donahue Peebles, who has developed commercial office buildings and a hotel in Washington, D.C., and has three other multimillion-dollar projects under way in Miami Beach.

Peebles' grandfather was a longtime doorman at the Sheraton Washington hotel.

"It's great to see what can happen in a generation or two," said Jesse Stewart Jr., the Royal Palm's 43-year-old general manager, who started in the hotel business 20 years ago staffing the front desk and cleaning rooms at another Miami Beach hotel.

His great-aunt, who lived in nearby Liberty City, remembered well the indignities of working in Miami Beach and returning home to a poor black neighborhood. "The beach could have been a hundred miles away from a social perspective for the African-American community in many ways," he said.

A display in the hotel's lobby will chronicle the hotel's history, including the racially charged boycott that led to its development.

It was June 1990 when Nelson Mandela, newly freed from a South Africa prison, visited the United States and publicly counted Fidel Castro as a friend of human rights and the antiapartheid movement.

Outraged, Miami's Cuban exile community pushed local officials to ignore Mandela's visit to the city. That forced politicians into a corner. They could anger the black community or anger the Cuban community, which had grown into the city's most powerful constituency.

Officials chose what they thought would be a gentler penance, the ire of black Miami. They snubbed Mandela when he came to visit, setting up a contrast to the hero's welcome he received in Boston, New York, Atlanta and Detroit.

"That really was a wakeup call to black Miamians, letting us know how little we were respected," Smith said. "It just forced leaders in the black community to say, 'Okay, we've had enough. We've got to take action.' "

After Mandela left, black leaders set their sights on the city's chief industry -- tourism. A survey found that black faces were almost nonexistent among the ranks of top hotel executives and mid-level managers.

Smith and other leaders of the boycott put the word out that summer that Miami-Dade County was an inhospitable place for the black visitors and conventioneers who accounted for 20 percent of the local tourism business. They told them to stay away until black residents got a bigger slice of Miami's economic pie.

The movement had its own rap song and its own video, a piece that showed Haitians being beaten by Miami police. Smith dubbed it the "Quiet Riot," a call for an alternative to the disturbances that rocked the city in previous years.

With a boycott, he told young blacks, "We can effectively riot and they can't arrest us. They can't shoot us down."

The movement also had the support of Miami's black churches and the black men and women who cleaned hotel rooms and worked in kitchens. Though hurt by the boycott, they went along with it, Smith said. "They said you do what you got to do. They're treating us like slaves anyway."

At one point, business leaders proposed a black-owned hotel for blighted Overtown.

"We told (them) absolutely, positively no," Smith said. "People come to Miami from around the world for the sand and the sun."

The boycott's impact was the subject of debate. A Miami Herald survey put the damage at between $50-million and $100-million. But black leaders said it was likely higher because there was no way to measure lost business from meeting planners who steered away from the city without telling anyone.

The pressure led to a settlement in 1993 in which Miami business and government leaders agreed to a list of 20 goals, including the hotel.

The other goals included programs to: give blacks more influence in the local waiters union; ensure more black companies were hired to supply hotels; deposit millions of private dollars into a local black-owned bank; and award 125 hotel management scholarships at Florida International University to black residents of Miami-Dade.

The scholarship program, financed in part by Peebles, has since graduated 127 black residents, many of whom are working in management-track jobs in local hotels. One is a sales manager at the Royal Palm.

Are black Miami residents in the tourism business better off since the boycott?

"There are some examples that it's working -- that people are beginning to rise up in the ranks," said Lee C. Dickson, an associate dean at FIU who helps administer the scholarship program. "When I go to meetings of the hotel association, when they have their luncheons and dinners, it's very rewarding to see them there and doing well."

For William D. Talbert III, the most significant moment since the boycott came in September 1999 when he joined Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas and then-president of the local NAACP, Adora Obi-Newze, in New York City to pitch Miami Beach as the site of the NAACP's 2003 national convention.

That effort by an anglo business executive, a Hispanic mayor and a black leader succeeded, and the Royal Palm is expected to be a leading venue for the convention.

"For me, that signaled the end of the healing process," Talbert said. "It was really a milestone in putting the issue behind us."

Unique among the 47 hotels that have opened in Miami-Dade County during an industry boom that began in 1998, the Royal Palm will represent more than a profit center.

Stewart insists the hotel will not be racially "monolithic" in its hiring or its marketing. The hotel's 422 rooms will enable the city convention center to market to larger groups of all stripes, he said. And the 35-member staff hired so far includes people from 12 countries who speak 10 languages.

Still, Stewart and others acknowledge the Royal Palm will be a magnet for the black people seeking work or a beach vacation.

Ironically, the hotel chain that includes the Royal Palm Crowne Plaza flag has consistently earned an unimpressive grade of C in the NAACP's annual report card on hotels and how they accommodate black guests.

Stewart said he expects that to change.

"And I expect to be recognized for it."

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